Carthaginians were Phoenicians but a colony.
Carthaginians were Phoenicians but a colony.
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And the Phoenicians were Caananites.
These were the people whom the Israelites were supposed to completely exterminate when they came out of Egypt in roughly 1200 BC (or roughly 1400 bc)
Why were they susposed to exterminate the Caananites? Because they practiced child sacrifice and all sorts of abominable sexual practices including homosexuality—
The Israelites killed many of the Caananites but they did not exterminate them. Because they did not exterminate the Caananites—they wound up adopting their ways over and over again. This included child sacrifice. There is in Israel a valley called the valley of hinnom where they performed these sacrifices. Because they did the detestable practices of the Caananites, the Israelites kindled God wrath against them. The first temple and Jerusalem were destroyed in 589 BC.
By the time of Jesus nearly 600 years later, the practice of Child sacrifice had disappeared from Israel and the surrounding roman provinces. The Phoenicians had been subdued by the Romans who found child sacrifice to be detestable.
Human sacrifice however, continued outside the boundaries of the Roman empire. Julius Caesar reported that the Gauls would build large wooden structures in the shape of a man and tie many men to the edifice to be burned. When the romans invaded Britian the last redoubt of the druids was on the isle of man. There were hundred of human sacrifices there after the battle that preceded its capture. In saudi arabia,—just beyond Roman control — there are reports that at the time of Jesus the moon goddess there was voracious in her appetite for human sacrifices.
People little appreciate how really really dark demonic and tortured the ancient world was—and how we are today coming dangerously close to tipping over into that age again.
They brought the practice with them from Tyre.